The present invention relates to a method of fitting pneumatic tires that improves the driving stability of an automobile in running the same on a dry road (hereinafter referred to as dry running) and on a wet road (hereinafter referred to as wet running).
Recently, demands for tires having higher performance and wider variety still continues to increase due to the expansion of expressway network to a full extent and due to the continuous improvement of the performance of passenger vehicles. For instance, all-season tires in which the inferiority of the wet running performance to the dry running one is small, tires employing a special belt material in order to improve riding comfort have been proposed.
It is known that the dry running performance, i.e., the dry running driving stability and the wet running performance, i.e., the wet running driving stability are in opposite relationship with each other, and that if one of these two performances is improved, the other performance lowers. Due to this fact, it is still impossible to provide a tire that can equally satisfy the above required performances.
The inventors of the present invention made various studies on how to improve both of the above two performances. It was found that it is when an automobile is run on a corner that the dry running and wet running driving stabilities are most evaluated, resulting in the present invention. Namely, when studying the functions of tires, the inventors did not consider a tire only, but intended to study and find the best functions exhibited by each tire while fitted to an automobile. In other words, the inventors intended to equally satisfy the above two performances by improving to a maximum extent a function of a tire that is considered most important in a certain condition.